


The Devil is Never a Maker

by EllieMurasaki



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s05e22 Swan Song, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-22
Updated: 2010-09-22
Packaged: 2017-10-12 02:44:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/119909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllieMurasaki/pseuds/EllieMurasaki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.</i> Sam gets out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Devil is Never a Maker

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Black Sabbath's "Heaven and Hell" (the lover of life's not a sinner, the ending is just a beginner). Written for fleshflutter's [Sam and Dean are reunited (or Dean at least finds out Sam isn't dead) comment-fic meme](http://fleshflutter.livejournal.com/153897.html).

It isn't for Sam the way it was for Dean. Dean got to _feel_ things. Not good things, true, but better than nothing.

Dean got a choice. Maybe it was the right thing to do, staying on the rack as long as he could stand to, but it kept him there. And after, learning from Alastair, that kept him there, too. Dean got a choice, and he kept choosing to stay.

If Lucifer and Michael stop fighting for thirty seconds and work together, they'll be out of the cage. It was never meant to hold two.

Ruby'd said once or twice that if Sam had any ambition beyond killing Lilith, he could knock hell down. No more putting souls in the oven and baking them till they're black and smoky. Sam knows exactly how trustworthy his judgment is not, especially when it comes to things Ruby said before Lilith died, but he doesn't think she was wrong.

Sam finds Adam. There isn't much left of him. That shouldn't be a surprise; Sam has no idea how long it's been. Sam stages a fit of fury, and Lucifer, playing sympathetic to Sam, helps separate Michael from Michael's grace.

Which, conveniently enough, puts a hell of a lot of power in Sam's hands. Michael was stronger than Lucifer; the only thing making the outcome uncertain, that day in Lawrence before Dean arrived, was Michael's reluctance to hurt his brother.

Sam has no idea what happens to Lucifer and Michael after that. Probably there'll be a couple kids in Kansas, or maybe Missouri, who have freaky memories that send them to the mental health department when they're two, like Anna, but neither of them has any power anymore and neither's likely to be able to get or keep supporters, so Sam doesn't much care. He'll track them down at some point, if he can, just to see who to avoid. Uriel would have been much more successful at keeping Anna's grace away from her if he hadn't been carrying it when he went to see her.

Sam doesn't know what day it is or even what year, let alone whether Dean's alive, and all he wants is to get Adam home safe, then go find Dean. Sam picks a direction and walks till he finds a road, then till he finds a town, tugging Adam's spirit behind him. Every bar has a drunk idiot who's willing to start a fistfight, so Sam provokes one, then ducks out before the cops come and shadow the ambulance; every hospital has people who die there, so it's easy enough to find a reaper who'll bring Adam to heaven.

Then there's only the desperate, all-consuming desire to know Dean's all right.

Then Sam's standing under a streetlight in Indiana, watching Dean sit down to a family dinner.

Sam watches as long as he can before the desire to go inside and shatter Dean's contentment becomes overpowering. Dean deserves so much better than Sam, and Sam has work to do.

There's no shortage of demons around. Sam tracks them all down, singly and in small groups, and eradicates them. Angels are harder to deal with, but not much. The biggest problem Sam's got is he can feel the way hell's drawing on his power, Lucifer's power, like he's the portable generator keeping the lights on downstairs. It's June when Sam gets out; it's September when he finally figures out how to break that link.

The trouble is, Lucifer's grace has shaped itself to accommodate a constant severe drain. Stop the drain and the tub overflows. Or, in Sam's case, starts burning him from the inside out. Sam figures out real quick how to get a feedback loop going, so he's healing as fast as he's burning, but there is still all this pressure inside his head, if he doesn't do something he'll explode, it's just like when with Ruby and Dean and—

Dean.

Dean's an archangel's vessel.

Dean deserves so much better than Sam, than an eternity of being caught in the net woven before they were born. But left alone long enough and Dean will die, will go back to heaven, which he didn't like much the first time, and Sam isn't sure he can follow. Doesn't know what he'll do when he can no longer think of Dean and a heartbeat later be watching him from across the street or behind a tree.

Part of Lucifer's problem, not nearly all but a large part, was being alone.

Sam goes to see Dean, and this time he lets Dean see him.

(The Winchester Gospels, the Good News about the brothers Winchester? It's that they're out there, somewhere, always will be, destroying the things that hide in the shadows, making it so no one need be afraid. They're working on convincing people to stop using hell to scare other people with, too, but that's not going so well: the people who didn't need proof of hell's existence won't take proof of hell's nonexistence, and neither Sam nor Dean wants to deal with the crazy that'll spring up if they tell the world they're the Second Coming of Christ.)


End file.
